Julian Assange's Molestation Case

A WORLD CLASS SCOOP IS BORN

(Original title: “Så föddes ett världsscoop”)

This article was originally published in Swedish on August 25 in the online edition of the Swedish magazine Resumé, owned by the Bonnier Group through Bonnier Tidskrifter. The Bonnier Group is a 200-year-old media company based in Stockholm, with operations in more than 20 countries, and one of Sweden’s largest media conglomerates. The article is available at the following URL: http://resume.se/nyheter/2010/08/25/sa-foddes-ett-varldsscoop/ though it is only viewable by subscribers to the magazine.

<article begins>

The Assange story is the largest scoop the tabloid Expressen has ever uncovered.
- Breaking news on CNN feels kind of big, says journalist Niklas Svensson.

But forget CIA, Pentagon and all talk of conspirations. The rape accusations are a mixture of one derailed night of love, Swedish sex crime law and messy handling by the prosecutor.

Resumé has gone through the relevant police files and talked to sources with a good insight into the two cases. Here is the short version:

A young woman in Enköping (a small town about 50 miles west of Stockholm, translator’s note), whom we will call Maria, saw Julian Assange on TV a couple of weeks ago and got curious about Wikileak. When she learned that he was going to hold a speech arranged by a group of Christian social democrats at LO-borgen (“the LO castle”, a building owned by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO), a trade union organization with ties to the social democratic party, translator’s note) she signed up as a volunteer, took a leave from her job and went to listen to the speech.

• Saturday, August 14

Maria helps Julian Assange to buy the right computer cable before his presentation. She waits for him while the congregated journalists interview him and is afterwards invited to a late lunch. The two of them take the subway to Cosmonova (an IMAX cinema in Stockholm, translator’s note) and watch a movie. Julian is going to attend a crayfish party in the evening and Maria goes home after being promised she’ll get to meet him again.

• Sunday, August 15

Maria tries to call Mr. Assange, but his cellphone is turned off.

• Monday, August 16

Maria gets ahold of Mr. Assange after work, they meet at Munkbron (a public square in central Stockholm, translator’s note) and decide to go to Enköping.They have safe sex in her apartment.

• Tuesday, August 17
The two have unprotected sex in the morning. Mr. Assange delays a meeting at Aftonbladet (Sweden’s largest daily, translator’s note) and they go together to the train station. Maria pays for everything, since Mr. Assange says he doesn’t have any money. He promises to call her.

• Wednesday, August 18

Maria is worried she has contracted an STD, maybe even HIV, from Assange. She had previously demanded that he should use a condom, but she is upset that he did not on Tuesday morning. She gets in touch with a woman, whom we will call Hanna, who has taken part in arranging Julian Assange’s visit to Sweden and let him use her apartment. At this point Hanna tells Maria that Julian Assange had molested her (Hanna) on the day before he held a speech at LO-borgen (later to be classified by the Chief Prosecutor as a case of non-sexual molestation/harassment, translator’s note).

• Friday, August 20th

At around 2 pm Maria and Hanna enter the police station in Klara (in central Stockholm, translator’s note) and ask for advice on how to proceed. According to one source, Maria wants to ask if it is possible to force Julian Assange to go through an HIV test. The police at duty listens to them separately and files a report of rape. 
She contacts the prosecutor who in turn issues an arrest warrant for Julian Assange. Maria is formally interrogated until 6.40 pm.

Expressen journalist Niklas Svensson is in Harpsund (the Swedish Prime Minister’s country residence outside of Stockholm, translator’s note) to cover the budget deliberations of Sweden’s ruling coalition when he gets tip-offed that Julian Assange has been arrested.

- I shifted my attention towards that case pretty quickly, so to speak. One and a half hour later I was back at my office. My colleague Diamant Salihu managed to get the prosecutor to confirm the case and I was working separately with my own sources.

• Saturday, August 21

At around 2 pm, Expressen’s journalists have finished the story which will shake life into news offices all over the Western world in a couple of hours.

The article is in the printed edition and on the net from 5 am. Niklas Svensson is satisfied:

- When I went home around 2.30 am I realized this would become one of the largest scoops we’ve ever had. The thing that surprises me the most is that it took such a long time before anybody else covered it.

- If it was Hanna who tipped me off? I can firmly deny that I have had any contact with her. We haven’t talked to each other at all.

The media hurricane struck the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office later during the day. The Prosecutor’s Office director of information Karin Rosander tries to explain the arrest warrant. At the same time, somebody in a top position in the office makes sure that the experienced Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné goes through the case. At 4.48 pm Eva Finné decides to cancel the arrest warrant. Julian Assange is no longer obliged to turn himself in, but if he gets in touch with the police he will be informed he is a suspect in two cases of non-sexual molestation/harassment (“ofredande”). (translator’s note: he is now only a suspect in one case)

• Tuesday, August 24
Maria has asked to have Claes Borgström represent her in the case of a trial.

Julian Assange has through a proxy denied doing anything criminal, but has hired Swedish lawyer Leif Silbersky to represent him.

Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné had at the time of publication not specified exactly what crimes Julian Assange stand accused of.

</end of article>

 

THE 30-YEAR-OLD WOMAN: I WAS MOLESTED

(Original title: “30-åriga kvinnan: Jag utsattes för övergrepp”)

This article was published in the online edition of Aftonbladet (Sweden’s largest daily) on August 21. It was written by Jessica Balksjö. Most of it has already been quoted by a lot of English-language newspapers/websites.

<article begins>

Aftonbladet has talked to one of the women behind the rape accusations made against Julian Assange. When she got in touch with a woman who told her that Assange had raped her they both went to the police.

The woman is in her 30’s and now wants to tell her story in Aftonbladet to clarify what the accusations against Assange are and to correct some of the errors that were reported in the story published by tabloid Expressen this morning.

Julian Assange met both the women during his visit in Sweden. He was at first suspected of having raped one of them, but those suspicions were ruled out by Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné, while he is still suspected of molesting/harassing the other woman.

Considers herself to have been sexually molested

The woman and Assange met during his time in Stockholm and had not previously met him nor each other.

The 30-year-old tells us that she, for her part, considers herself to have been sexually abused, or molested, but not raped.

She was contacted by another woman in her 20’s who told her Julian Assange had carried out similar abuse to her, but worse.

Gave a detailed account

Out of consideration to the ongoing police investigation, the 30-year-old does not want to reveal any more details, but she says she has given a very detailed account to the police, as has the other woman.

- I immediately believed her story since I had had a similar experience to what she was telling me, the woman tells Aftonbladet.

The both women now decided to go together to the police station to tell them what had happened.

“I don’t feel threatened”

- It’s completely wrong that we are afraid of Assange and therefore unwilling to report him, he is not violent and I don’t feel threatened by him, the woman tells Aftonbladet.

In both cases, the sex had been consensual from the start but had eventually turned into abuse.

- The other woman wanted to report for rape. I told the police my story as a witness account to her story and to support her. We are completely behind the accuracy of the information we have given, she tells Aftonbladet.

“The accusations are not staged”

The woman dismiss the many conspiratorial theories that are currently flooding the net
.

- The accusations against Assange are of course not staged by neither the Pentagon or anybody else. The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl is with a man with a twisted view of woman and a problem to accept a “no”.

</end of article>

 

via http://assangemolestation.tumblr.com/

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Have You Seen Chin?!? #BONESBRIGADE

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BONES BRIGADE:
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

It's not a death metal band, an extreme diet club or historic dominoes association—the Bones Brigade was a talented gang of teenage outcasts. Unmotivated by fame or popularity, they completely dedicated their lives to a disrespected art form. For most of the 1980s, this misfit crew headed by a 1970s ex-skateboard champion blasted the industry with a mixture of art and raw talent becoming the most popular skateboarding team in history. The core unit of the Bones Brigade built an empire that covered the world. They dominated contests, made hundreds of thousands of dollars, created the modern skateboard video, reinvented endemic advertising, pushed skate progression into a new era, and set the stage for a totally new form of skating called street style. There's nothing comparable in today's skateboarding.

In 1978, a mechanical engineer who had developed new skateboard products teamed up with one of the most popular skaters of the era. George Powell and Stacy Peralta created Powell Peralta and immediately began retooling how skateboard products were made and marketed.

George, who had started developing products in his garage and kitchen oven, went on to invent innovative equipment such as double radial Bones wheels, named for their unique whiteness, and trend setting skateboard decks. Stacy recruited the skaters and handled marketing along with his longtime creative cohort Craig Stecyk III. Rejecting the expected action shot marketing, they used their young team to create esoteric images conveying the culture's sarcasm and disenfranchised dark humor. While spitballing about his stable of skaters, Stacy commented that he never wanted to call them a "team," a label that invited all kinds of jock baggage. Craig shrugged and simply said, "Bones Brigade."

Powell Peralta reinterpreted a military motif, warping it with pioneering skateboard graphics more suited to biker gang tats than decks. As great a skater as Stacy was, his scouting skills surpassed any celebrated onboard skills. By 1984, Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, Tommy Guerrero and Mike McGill compiled the most competitively dominant skateboard team in history. On top of winning large, cheap plastic trophies, Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen—two 13-year-olds initially ridiculed by their peers—created new ways to skate and pioneered modern technical skating.

Disgruntled at the way the skate mags played favorites, Stacy weaponized consumer VCRs by directing The Bones Brigade Video Show in 1983. The low-budget amateur skateboard video was the first of its kind and sold a surprising 30,000 copies (including Betamax!).

At the time, skating needed all the help it could get. The 1970s "fad" that swept the country after the invention of the urethane wheel had deflated embarrassingly by 1981. Remaining participants' social status ranked below the chess club. Powell Peralta averaged an anemic 500 monthly board sales and Tony Hawk once received a royalty check for 85¢. To increase brand awareness and grow skateboarding, Stacy produced and created a new Bones Brigade video every year, showcasing his crew's varied personalities and invented maneuvers. The videos routinely featured riders crawling out of sewers, skating abandoned pools and back alleys, bombing desolate hills—essentially shredded an apocalyptic world hidden to most non-skaters.

By the mid-'80s, Brigade videos were sold all over the world and a new generation of teens discovered skating, making the Brigade international stars. The dearth of skateparks forced enthusiasts to DIY it, triggering a wooden ramp revolution. Endemic brands had started their own magazines and for the first time skaters controlled every aspect of skateboarding. Powell Peralta peaked in 1987 with $27 million in annual sales while its pro team continued to dominate contests, cash $20,000 monthly royalty checks, tour the world, occasionally cause riots and star in the ambitious The Search for Animal Chin, which remains the most successful skateboard video of all time.

But the activity's cyclical nature reaffirmed itself by the end of the decade and skateboarding descended back to the faded fad category. The industry broke apart as zeros dropped off checks and most top pros drifted away in search of second jobs. Powell Peralta dissolved over the owners' business differences and Stacy left to pursue filmmaking in Hollywood. Almost all the core Brigade members split and started their own skateboard brands just like their mentor had in 1978. George regrouped and continued making skate products under the Powell and Bones banner.

Twenty years on, the Brigade all remain in skateboarding. Although they've succeeded in separate endeavors, they continue to be bonded together as veterans of a culture war. Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Lance Mountain and Steve Caballero remain skate stars while Tommy Guerrero runs a skate brand and Mike McGill owns and operates one of the most successful independent skate shops in the country. In 2001, Stacy returned to skateboarding with his award-winning documentary Dogtown and Z Boys.

RANDOM QUOTES FROM BONES BRIGADE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

"You couldn't find a nicer group of fucking Boy Scouts than the Bones Brigade."

—Glen Friedman

"They weren't just guys who dominated competition, but they were also skateboarders who invented some of the most revolutionary maneuvers out of that entire decade."

—Stacy Peralta

"I didn't like his [Hawk's] style. He was just an annoying little fucking kid with way too many pads on."

—Duane Peters

"Stecyk and I are spitballing ideas one day and I'm telling him that I don’t want to call this a team and I don’t want the word skateboarding in the name of it. Craig looks at me and says, 'Bones Brigade.'"

—Stacy Peralta

"Everybody is like: Who is this weirdo? He pops out, says some fortune cookie thing that makes no sense and then recedes back."

—Sean Mortimer

"I would love to be able to tell you I'm wearing woman's underwear and I don’t know why I'm wearing woman's underwear, but I'm not."

—Craig Stecyk Iii

"They asked Cab, 'Could you hold this dead dog for an ad?' He said, 'Aw, I don’t want to do it.' I said, 'I'll do it!' I was Mikey that got all the cool stuff that they thought was lame."

—Lance Mountain

"It was the first time that I've ever had someone so serious and say, 'What's wrong with you? Don't you care about skateboarding?' I think I almost started crying."

—Steve Caballero

"What makes us all do what we do at a high level is an inspiration that comes from so deep … almost a controlled desperation and if you can't tap into that then it extinguishes."

—Rodney Mullen

"I won two of the Whittiers and then I needed beer money. I didn't think I could win because I wasn't skating that much, but I knew I could get in the top 5. That was when I really noticed that Hawk was doing some shit that didn't make any sense to me."

—Duane Peters

"The prize money for first at a pro contest was $150, but I was fourteen-years-old! Sign me up. I'm cashing in. I'm going to buy a Moped!"

—Tony Hawk

"I learned early on from my own generation that one of the worst things you can do to a teenager is give them too much attention and money. It destroys their perception of themselves and it wrecks them."

—Stacy Peralta

"We were in a van once and frightened … these kids are going to kill us! They were [screaming] 'We love you!" We were like, 'Wait a second! Let us get out of the van before you tip it over and light it on fire!'"

—Tommy Guerrero

"It sounds terrible to say, but our group of dudes pioneered the way to make money at skateboarding."

—Lance Mountain

"He won everything, or close to it. That creates so much more pressure because there's no gratification in winning, there's only upholding something so you don’t lose it … it's like a Kafka short story: you build something but you can't live in the house because you sit around guarding it."

—Rodney Mullen

"Rodney was fucking crazy. Completely. But in the mad genius way: He could tell you some historical fact, but then he'd be … 'Hey, how do you open this door?'"

—Tommy Guerrero

"Skateboarding has nothing to do with competition or sport. It has to do with trying to stay as immature as you can for the rest of your life. It's kind of a lame thing to say, but it really is."

—Lance Mountain

"Was there ever a skatepark designed that was as good as an average sewer or curb? No."

—Craig Stecyk

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a punk prayer - pussy riot

 

http://www.amnestyusa.org/

Curiosity/ Mars Rover//

Mars Panorama - Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2 in New Mexico

Wikileaks needs you/ video//

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Declaration by the Government of the Republic of Ecuador on the asylum application Assange

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the revolution will not be televised (but it will be on the internet)

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Dunning-Kruger Effect

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way"

Charles Bukowski

 

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others"

 

Nelio - Babel, B15 Gallery, Copenhagen

[[posterous-content:pid___1]]BABEL

an exhibition in Copenhagen in August, at B15 Gallery.[[posterous-content:pid___2]]

[[posterous-content:pid___0]]

ANTHRACITE

Artwork for the exhibition Anthracite in Lyon.
Acrylic on wood construction. 90x90cm

seal of authority

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authority

noun

1 a rebellion against those in authority: power, jurisdiction, command, control, charge, dominance, rule, sovereignty, supremacy; influence; informal clout.

2 the authority to arrest drug traffickers: authorization, right, power, mandate, prerogative, license, permission.

3 (authorities) they failed to report the theft to the authorities: officials, officialdom; government, administration, establishment; police; informal the powers that be.

4 an authority on the stock market: expert, specialist, aficionado, pundit, guru, sage.

5 on good authority: evidence, testimony, witness, attestation, word, avowal; Law deposition.

 

Protecting New Zealand from Terrorist Acts

Counter-terrorism is an important part of the Service's security intelligence work. While the terrorist threat to New Zealand is currently assessed as low, terrorism is a growing international problem. This means that New Zealand needs to take the threat seriously.

There are individuals and groups in New Zealand with links to overseas organisations that are committed to acts of terrorism, violence and intimidation. There are extremists who advocate using violence to impress their own political, ethnic or religious viewpoint on others.

It is important that New Zealand is not used as a safe haven from which to plan or facilitate terrorist acts elsewhere.

The Service’s role

The Service collects intelligence related to terrorist activity and, through its links with other security and intelligence organisations overseas, it monitors as closely as possible the movements of known terrorists around the world.

Also located within the Service is an interdepartmental group, called the Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG), whose role is to inform government's risk management processes by providing timely and accurate assessment of terrorist and criminal threats of physical harm to New Zealanders and New Zealand interests.

The Service is represented within CTAG, as are other agencies. These include:

• New Zealand Police
• Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)
• New Zealand Defence Force
• Maritime New Zealand, and
• New Zealand Customs Service.

 

Collateral Murder - Wikileaks - Iraq

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

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Wikileaks obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths occurred.

Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com

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A spoof of the fact that major credit card and online payment companies have withheld over $15 Million in donations to WikiLeaks.

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